Stumbling Godward

On a Sunday morning in late 2013, I was a youth pastor seated in church wishing the preacher would die.

He was a friend. One I cared for. I’d recommended him to the church leadership as a fresh addition with great potential. We’d had heart-to-hearts. Good meals together. First experiences.

As I wished him dead, a seething hatred also rose within me for the church I attended. I walked out mid-sermon.

The hatred was foreign to me. When I converted at age 23, it was from militant agnosticism mixed with sexual addiction into a joy that my mind could not keep up with.

A mystical experience in the Los Angeles had triggered my literally overnight transformation into something I never dreamt I could be: a God-addicted true believer who loved God more than anything in his life. Not his church or activities or books about him or the security of belonging to a group of friendly virgins who didn’t cuss or swear. I loved him.

I would steal away to the Huntington Library on a summer’s morning with a camera and some fruit and fall asleep on a bench with prayers on my breath. Prayers for him to remain near, wordless heart paeans for the sunlight and shadows across a green lawn, for the family of brown ducks paddling under the red Japanese-style bridge.

So I loved, and so he poured simple joy into my heart. I never believed Christians could overcome sin, and after drinking the joy of God my beliefs were confirmed. Christians can’t overcome sin. Joy does. Every other effort to be moral is an inferior manmade skiff doomed to leak and sink along the way. These shoddy efforts are responsible for the widespread perception that most Christians are hypocrites.

How did I wind up hating a brother that Sunday morning?

I felt outshone. I was right about his great potential, and wrong that I really cared to see it realised. When he was tapped to teach classes I never got to teach, I swept aside the mild stirrings of envy. When he was offered the Sunday pulpit the first time, I told myself I’d said I wouldn’t be interested in the same — youth was my thing, I’d told my leaders.

When he’d taken the Sunday pulpit the second time and attempted to correct something I’d said the week before, I lost it. I hated that he seemed more esteemed than me. I hated that our leaders trusted him more, thought more highly of him. I lost it.

When you’re still neck-deep in a local church, its activities and communities, you never think of biting the hand that feeds you. Not in terms of money, but in identity and self-worth.

When you speak and lead and use your talents in church out of a pure heart, you are someone who loves and is loved, someone whose person is appreciated and whose gifts cause impact. It’s a wonderful feeling. The resulting relational nourishment you draw from people, in good times, raises your tolerance for the community’s flaws.

People are terrified of worthlessness. No matter how successful or downtrodden they are, they naturally avoid lines of reasoning that call in question the legitimacy of their value as persons. The cuckolded husband, straggler student and the neglected daughter feel a similar identity-pain. The potential pain is terrifying. Our emotional cores flee this pain as children would from a twisting, thrashing inferno.

The day I walked out on the sermon and wished the preacher dead marked the start of greater freedom for me. Freedom from pain.

Life in church is good when it’s good. But should you ever become disillusioned — when people let you down, or show their brokenness in a way that scalds and burns you, tramples your personhood — it can be an opportunity to get free.

It’s not that I became a storming cynic, eager to tear the everyone down and destroy everything the Church stands for. But I gained the benefit of distance. Of being untethered. Of not needing the illusory safety buttressed by the favorable opinions of man.

When my sense of identity and security were flatly ejected from their former haven, I became free to critique the church. Not in an unthinking, vindictive manner — I’d had enough great experiences in the Church that I knew it could be amazing.

I saw that many of the doctrines and promises of the Church fail to explain the breadth of life. People don’t always get healed. Lives don’t always get fixed within a lifetime. Tragedies don’t stop, though the tears shed do.

This failure could have been fatal to my continued identification as a God-loving Christian. But it catapulted me into a new way of seeing God.

God as one who immaculately resists the enclosure of human institutions, brick walls and sermon outlines.

As one whose Spirit continues to brood over the whole world with its kaleidoscope of people and culture and activity.

Yet not brooding as one waiting to impregnate it with physical existence, but one that has already impregnated the earth’s chief agents and stewards with the essence of Himself.

So they might share his joy of twisting or shaking the kaleidoscope to produce a dazzling iridescence of optimism and freedom and abundance.

As I wished my friend dead, my heart left the church and saw God everywhere else. My identity and worth left the false harbor of human approval, and are now in the shipyard.

Getting a new coat of paint.